I Got Nowhere Else to Go

The Thing I’m Doing This Year #24

I haven’t been hiking much this month for various reasons. Twice I decided not to hike based on the weather. So I’m not that much closer to obtaining my impossible goal of hiking to Barr Camp, halfway up the mountain, in under 1 hour and 55 minutes … my personal best from 2006.

You can’t let possible weather dictate your life.

Pay attention to what’s going on, sure, but keep moving forward. I rode my bike to work one Friday and at closing time there was a thunderstorm warning for my personal part of El Paso County, so I got a ride home.

Well, long story short, it never rained. I could have biked home.

The next Monday it was a different story. No thunderstorm warnings, but rain was a distinct possibility. I threw caution to the wind, winds?, and took off for home. No weather is going to slow me down. About halfway home I get caught with my pants down … I mean, not literally … I wasn’t even wearing pants so to speak … I was wearing shorts. I proceeded to get pounded by a torrential downpour, because that’s the only kind of downpour there is … torrential. Just completely hammered and not in a good way.

I think it was a little pay back. One time when I was riding home, I thought to myself, the farther away I get from the heathens of downtown Colorado Springs and the West Side and the closer I get to Briargate the greater my chances for divine weather intervention. Surely, the Good Lord wouldn’t rain on me during the greatest bike ride of my life, I mused.

Then I thought, the next time I’m going to get pounded.

I think a lot when I’m riding my bike.

So back to the deluge. I am wetter than wet during the hardest part of the trip. It’s rained hard the entire trip about 30 minutes straight, until I was two blocks from the house. When I get home, I am exhausted because as it turns out, you bike harder when you are in the middle of a storm. I get home, squeeze the water out of my socks, peel off my clothes, grab a recovery drink … a Laughing Lab, and head upstairs to take a bath. I’m a little chilly.

Back in the old days if you biked 30 minutes in a torrential downpour and got chilly that usually was a death sentence … you’d get pneumonia, they put leeches all over your body and that’d be all she wrote. Next thing you know, you ain’t knowing nothing, cause you’re dead. The eternal dirt nap.

By the time I get to the bedroom, sunshine is pouring through the window. When I get in the tub, all I can see out the window are blue skies.

I thought it was funny.

I’m in the tub looking for the clip from “An Officer and a Gentleman” when Sgt. Foley is trying to get Zack Mayo to DOR by spraying Mayo in the face with a water hose, because that’s what it felt like biking home.